But like so much of the hype on round-the-clock radio stations, little of this news is genuinely breaking. And most of those en route to Venice already know that: 30 years after museums first welcomed modern art that burst the bounds of static objects (installation art, video, performance art and various combinations thereof), there’s little anticipation among the Giardini Pubblici-bound passengers that they’ll see something really new. The best they can hope for is a clever turn on a previously clever turn on a formerly revolutionary gambit. The ambient feeling at the Marco Polo airport taxi queue is, if not quite fatigue, cultural roteness: OK, this is the Biennale drill, we know what to do, so let’s get on with it.
Supply is not the problem. Director Harald Szeemann has invited more than 100 artists into the main theme exhibition, “Platform of Thought,” and at least that many more fill the 60-plus national pavilions and displays. Art’s new status as front-page news is evidenced by the changing faces of the corporate sponsors: it used to be that only big, cold banks attached their names to modern-art enterprises to appear a little less big and cold. Then came tobacco companies hoping to cleanse their names. Recently, high-end clothing firms have discovered lots of potential customers standing around trying to look chic at art exhibitions, and now–as the new capitalism swallows bohemia whole–here comes Bloomberg, the financial-news service, to underwrite the British pavilion.
The British entry is one of the “hot” pavilions, with long lines of spectators waiting to get in to see the work of Mark Wallinger, famous for his baldheaded statue of Christ placed atop a giant plinth in Trafalgar Square last year. That work–looking here on the gallery floor like a towel attendant in a steam bath–is the pavilion’s centerpiece. It’s accompanied, in adjoining rooms, by a couple of videos–one of the artist as a blind man in front of a backward-running subway escalator, and another, in super slo-mo, of people coming through the arrivals door at an airport. It’s called “Threshold to the Kingdom,” and the sound track is Allegri’s “Miserere.” Very ironic, very British and, since the heyday of J. Arthur Rank, very done to death.
An even hotter pavilion is Germany’s, with longer lines and fewer people at a time being admitted to navigate the difficult spaces that Gregor Schneider has transported from “Dead House,” his ongoing trans-formation (rooms within rooms, ceilings lowered, corridors to nowhere, etc.) of a desultory tenement house in his native town of Rheydt. Schneider, who started the house project in 1985 when he was just 16, would probably be the closest thing to a Biennale discovery, if he hadn’t already startled the art world with a similar piece in London’s “Apocalypse” show last year.
Another contender for groundbreaker is the Canadian team of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, with their fully loaded version of installation art. “The Paradise Institute” features a movie theater that plays a short, Hollywood-ish video that, in turn, seems to be playing inside the head of a bedridden character. Add to that some headphone sound effects of popcorn-chewing, and you’ve got major–and intentional–disorientation. Brutely mesmerizing it is, but–as one visitor remarked–more akin to Baz Luhrmann’s new movie, “Moulin Rouge,” than to, say, the early modern Canadian landscape painters known as the Group of Seven.
Getting in to see sculptor Robert Gober’s exhibition at the American pavilion can be just as patience-trying. But judging from the early audience buzz, he’s a tough sell amid all the carnivalia at the Biennale. Gober’s attempt to weave very separate individual sculptures–handmade replicas of Styrofoam chunks, planks of plywood, gin bottles, newspaper clippings and a toilet plunger–into a subtle narrative about childhood’s end and homophobia’s menace is seen by many as visually ungenerous, and narratively hermetic. But it’s also conceptually rigorous, technically marvelous and just plain smart. In the context of the Biennale, Gober’s presentation is a throwback to old-fashioned… art.
If celebrity draw is any indication of talent, then Korea’s Do-Ho Suh ranks near the top. His work “Some/One,” a totemic figure made from, and rising out of a sea of, military dogtags, forms the centerpiece of the Korean pavilion, which hosted one of the Biennale’s poshest opening parties. Top art-world honchos scuffled for seats on the water taxis that ferried invitees directly from the Giardini to the Guggenheim Collection, where they attended a live-chamber-music luncheon on the roof, which offers one of the best views in Venice. But Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture, while beautiful, is also somewhat obvious. (The artist was born in Seoul, went to Yale and lives in New York: his theme is, of course, identity.)
Obviousness is perhaps the unintended thread running through much of the Biennale. In the huge Arsenale building, where the nonpavilion works are shown, there’s such fare as a lampoon Web site for liberal whites called “thirdworldfriend.com,” and a team-of-artists installation entitled “Street Market,” comprising a full-size bodega with cans of s–t (“Hard Turd Variety”) and plastic liters of “Identity”-brand soda for sale. Any connection to what might even loosely be called art has been sacrificed in favor of the tinny cacophony of real life moved indoors. A viewer of it paused to put some drops in her eyes; a woman passing said, “That helps?”
Are there any jewels to be found in all this portentous muck? A few: the hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck’s giant squatting “Boy,” rescued from its ignomy by association with Britain’s Millenium Dome, American Richard Tuttle’s timid little painted plywood constructions and Dutch artist Mark Manders’s elegantly spooky vitrine of all-black detritus, “Reduced Night Scene.”
But mostly, the artistic landscape in Venice is, if not barren, pretty flat. With the AIDS crisis moved to Africa, few Euro-American artists are moved to cry out about it; Gober is an exception. With the former Yugoslavia now relatively quiet, gone are artists’ pleas on behalf of “nomadism.” And with so much art morphed into a kind of dark underbelly of department-store-window decoration, gone is most beauty. But two years from now, that connecting flight from London will be full again. Let’s just hope that the passengers’ mobile phones don’t suddenly get “text’d” in midair with a single, uninterrupted message: “Don’t bother.”
